Movies, shows and music served from a box you own
Jellyfin is a free software media server. It indexes folders of movies, TV series, music, books and photos, pulls artwork and metadata, and streams the library to a browser or to the client app on each device. Anything a device cannot play gets transcoded on the fly. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS or in a container, and only goes online to fetch metadata.
GPU transcoding and TV apps with nothing behind a paywall
- No premium tier: the server and the official clients are free, and no feature is held back for a paid licence. The project site also says there is no tracking and no central server collecting data.
- Hardware transcoding through jellyfin-ffmpeg: Intel QSV, NVIDIA NVENC, AMD AMF, VA-API on Linux, Video Toolbox on macOS and RKMPP on Rockchip. An FFmpeg build from outside the official packages only gets partial acceleration.
- Official apps down to the living room: web, Jellyfin Media Player on desktop, Android, iOS, Android TV and Fire TV, Roku, webOS, Tizen, Xbox and two Kodi add-ons. Swiftfin, the iOS and tvOS video client, is still labelled beta.
- API described in OpenAPI: every server hosts its own Swagger docs at
/api-docs/swagger/index.html.
TV recording and audiobook shelves next to the films
- Record broadcast TV from an HDHomeRun tuner or an M3U playlist of IPTV channels, with guide data from XMLTV or Schedules Direct (paid, US and Canada only).
- Watch a film with friends in different homes, with SyncPlay keeping every player in step.
- Shelve audiobooks, EPUBs and comics: since 12.0 the server reads OPF and ComicInfo metadata without a plugin, though audiobook chapters are only reachable through the API so far.
- Run round-the-clock channels: Tunarr builds a programme schedule out of a Jellyfin library and feeds it back to the server as an emulated HDHomeRun tuner.
Wants a GPU, keeps SQLite local, and 12.0 cannot be rolled back
The hardware guide advises against a server with no graphics card. CPU transcoding is expensive and HDR to SDR tone-mapping makes it worse: depending on the configuration, even a Ryzen 9 5950X can fail to handle a single stream. The guide recommends 8 GB of RAM (4 GB may do on a Linux server with no desktop), favours Intel over AMD, whose encoder quality and drivers it calls poor, and warns against most single-board computers, "especially the Raspberry Pi 5", and prebuilt NAS appliances.
The SQLite database has to sit on a local disk. Samba or NFS shares must be mounted at the OS level, and the database must stay off network storage; the docs put it at 10 to 100 GB for a moderate-sized library. The scanner expects folders named its way (one folder per film, Title (year)), and the FAQ lists that naming as one of the two usual reasons a file never shows up.
The README calls Jellyfin an alternative to the proprietary Emby and Plex. The project was forked from Emby 3.5.2 in December 2018, when Emby announced a closed-source 4.x. Volunteers do all the development, and the code is GPL-2.0, so a modified version that gets redistributed must keep the same licence.
The current release is 12.3, from 23 October 2026. Version 12.0 landed on 8 September 2026 after seven release candidates, and three bugfix releases have followed. Its database changes cannot be undone short of restoring a full backup, it drops the /emby and /mediabrowser routes that some older third-party clients still rely on, and admins are told to remove repository plugins before migrating. There is no release calendar: the FAQ says a version ships once testing stops turning up new issues. The latest commit is dated 26 October 2026.